Scarlett Johansson is beautiful but awkward as Janet Leigh in “Hitchcock.” Photo:

Scarlett Johansson is beautiful but awkward as Janet Leigh in “Hitchcock.” (
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The year is 1959. Alfred Hitchcock is sweating his latest project, which may be unreleasable and in which he has sunk his own money. The film isn’t going well. “What if,” he worries, “it’s another ‘Vertigo’?”

“Hitchcock” is in part a good-natured study in such film-nerd humor. Hitch is making “Psycho,” which will turn out well enough, and we know (as he doesn’t) that “Vertigo” will someday be acclaimed as the best film ever made.

A pillowy and endearing Anthony Hopkins has a lot of fun (and is a bit of a ham) in the title role. “You may call me ‘Hitch,’ hold the ‘cock,’ ” he enjoys telling starlets.

In contrast to the highly skillful Toby Jones (who is playing a much drier, more sinister and less lovable Hitch from the same period in the HBO movie “The Girl”), Hopkins shows why he is a leading man and Jones is not: It’s all about charm, about commanding the audience’s gaze, about filling the room. This is the kind of gig that is precision-engineered to win an Oscar nomination, and probably will.

“Hitchcock,” adapted freely and with brio by John J. McLaughlin from the book “Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho” by Stephen Rebello, actually reminded me of many an HBO film — well-made but pedestrian — for its initial half-hour or so. But finding in the making of a single film enough insights to define how a great artist worked, “Hitchcock” so astutely explores its subject’s psyche that it may tell us a lot about artists in general.

Haunted by fears that his wife, Alma (Helen Mirren), is having an affair with a writer (Danny Huston) with whom she is collaborating on a screenplay (at his beach house), Hitch makes much out of nothing. In a misguided “aha!” moment, he interrogates her for tracking beach sand into their bathroom, which proves exactly nothing. This film is not the first to notice that gifted creative folk often conjure up internal storms in order to make it rain ideas, but director Sacha Gervasi, whose only previous helming credit was the 2008 documentary “Anvil: The Story of Anvil,” has a tidy way of showing this process without being too direct.

Mirren, whose supportive but tart Alma at first feels generic, grows as the picture goes on, and by the end, when she steps in to work uncredited as an editor whose acumen saves “Psycho” at the last minute, she comes to stand for all the anonymous women in the history of art who made significant but unacknowledged contributions to their men’s creations.

Hitch’s reliance on Alma amounts to a slight challenge of the prevailing feminist view of Hitch as a sort of femivore who delighted in churning through one interchangeable blonde after another; Vera Miles (Jessica Biel) here is far from just another face to Hitch: She disappointed him because she turned down “Vertigo” to have a child. He is charming rather than sleazy with Janet Leigh (awkwardly played by Scarlett Johansson).

The film’s view of the artist as facing eternal warfare with dim little censors in spectacles is also not original, but the director’s fight with the Shurlock board — the movies’ self-censorship group — that threatened to keep the film out of theaters entirely for violating Hollywood’s production code is a neat illustration of how movies have changed. Perhaps more important, these scenes show how a craftsman could work around the censor and create the scariest scene ever put on film without once showing human flesh being damaged.

We never see the shower sequence here (we don’t have to), but Gervasi stays with Hitch at a New York screening of the film as he lurks outside the auditorium listening for the crowd’s reaction. It goes exactly as hoped. When Hopkins’ Hitch directs the audience by waving his hands like a symphony conductor — it’s a nice callback to a Hannibal Lecter highlight — it’s one of the best scenes of the year: a delightfully personal way to show how the story of “Psycho” concluded.